uucp for sneakernet (was Re: Emulating the School...]

[david at lang.hm]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, John Gilmore wrote:

>> uucp ... the first place I'd turn for
>> sneaker-netting posix-ish systems together.
>
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP
>
> Yep.  UUCP is great if there's a phone line that can dial overnight
> cheaply, but no Internet.  I released the first free implementation of
> uucp (gnuucp), which was later succeeded by my friend Ian Taylor's
> "Taylor uucp", which I believe is still the best free version.  Ian
> <ian at airs.com> may still even maintain it (last release: 1.07 in
> 2003).  See:
>
>  http://www.airs.com/ian/software.html
>
> There was also an MSDOS implementation of uuslave (the predecessor of
> gnuucp), maintained by Tim Pozar <pozar at lns.com>, which was widely
> used to gateway Fidonet nodes to Usenet/UUCP nodes.  That was the
> first project I worked on to bring thousands of 14-year-olds into the
> global network.  See:
>
>  http://www.lns.com/papers/ufgate/
>
> If a remote school has a dialup phone connection that can run TCP/IP
> over a modem, that's probably better than running uucp over it, even
> if you can only run it at night due to telco charges.  But uucp has a
> lot of scheduling and queueing support that more modern TCP/IP systems
> have forgotten about.

I've used UUCP over TCP/IP as a mail path for systems that only had 
intermittent network connectivity and it worked very well. if the system 
can detect when it does have connectivity and connect up to a server every 
few min while it retains it, it will do a good job of getting the messages 
through. you don't need to drop down to dialup to make it work, and using 
uucp avoids reinventing the wheel, intermittent connectivity is what it 
was designed for, and it doesn't really matter if that connectivity is 
serial or TCP/IP.

David Lang